“Never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform.”
Thus spoke Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of England, on Tuesday night, 20th October, to a group of Scottish
business people. Echoing one of Churchill’s many famous sayings, Governor King is probably one of the highest ranking people around to state, at last, what everyone on the Clapham Omnibus (a London bus route) knows to be obvious. Whether the forces can build to a point where common sense is applied by Governments before we enter another Great Depression is another matter.
Mention of the Great Depression (the last one) triggers a step back in time.
On June 16th 1933 Franklin Roosevelt signed into law the Glass-Steagall Act. In fact that was the second Act signed
into law, the first Act was passed by Congress in February 1932 and was largely designed to stop deflation. The second Act was, in a sense, much more important because it set out to prevent bank holding companies from owning other financial institutions. It was repealed on November 12th, 1999 by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. Just a little under 10 years ago. 10 years which have seen the biggest boom-bust probably ever in modern history. And has much of the Western world slipping into another great depression.
US Senator Carter Glass and US Congressman Henry B. Steagall must be turning in their graves
But thank goodness for investigative journalism and the role of the Internet in creating a truly open ‘meeting place’.
people (probably mostly in the Middle East, Asia or Africa) start to fight over scarce resources.
who should be shrinking, it undermines growing standards of living and can even bring them down.”
Learning from Dogs 